Risk of Cardiovascular Events Similar With, Without Diabetes

TUESDAY, June 20, 2017 (HealthDay News) -- For patients undergoing coronary angiography (CAG), those with and without diabetes without coronary artery disease (CAD) have the same risk of death, cardiac death, and myocardial infarction, according to a study published online June 8 in Diabetes Care.

Kevin K.W. Olesen, M.D., from the Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark, and colleagues stratified a population-based cohort of patients registered in the Western Denmark Heart Registry who underwent CAG according to the presence or absence of obstructive CAD and diabetes. Data were included for 93,866 patients, of whom 13.4 percent had diabetes at the time of CAG.

During a median follow-up of 4.1 years, the researchers found that the adjusted risk of death (rate ratio, 1.03; 95 percent confidence interval, 0.92 to 1.15), cardiac death (rate ratio, 1.21; 95 percent confidence interval, 0.90 to 1.64), and myocardial infarction (rate ratio, 0.88; 95 percent confidence interval, 0.65 to 1.17) was the same for patients with and without diabetes without obstructive CAD. Compared to patients without diabetes and CAD, patients with diabetes without CAD were more often treated with statins (75.3 versus 46.0 percent) and aspirin (65.7 versus 52.7 percent).

"In a real-world population, patients with diabetes with high rates of statin and aspirin treatment had the same risk of cardiovascular events as patients without diabetes in the absence of angiographically significant CAD," the authors write.

One author was supported by a grant from the Program for Clinical Research Infrastructure established by the Lundbeck and Novo Nordisk Foundations.